Outgoing maestro agent defines her future links with IMG

Outgoing maestro agent defines her future links with IMG

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norman lebrecht

September 29, 2014

Statement just posted by Kathryn Enticott, who has flown the coop:

kathryn

To avoid further speculation, I wanted to make my own announcement about my on-going relationship with IMG Artists and the start of my new company, Enticott Music Management.

I have worked for IMG Artists for many years – in fact, almost half my life – and I am extremely grateful that the shareholders and COO, Lorna Aizlewood, were willing to find a way for me to manage artists in association with IMGA while having more autonomy in the way I work that includes me being able to accept new projects and challenges. I want to make it clear that EMM will continue to work with IMGA exclusively on the management of Semyon Bychkov, Alan Gilbert (for Europe), Franz Welser-Most, Leif Ove Andsnes, Nikolaj Znaider and Milos Karadaglic and will also consult to IMGA on the management of other artists.

I have huge admiration for the team at IMGA. Some of the greatest managers in the business work for the company and the sense of team spirit we enjoy has been excellent . Change is challenging but my colleagues and friends will have nothing but my support as IMGA evolves over the coming months and years.

Comments

  • May says:

    Who cares? Why give her a forum for name-dropping?

    • OhGlorioso says:

      If you don’t care then why are you commenting on the story? And, clearly, you don’t understand why this site is all about.

  • OhGlorioso says:

    “…what this site” rather.

  • Thomas Anderson says:

    This looks to me some kind of damage limitation on behalf of IMG Artists. I am told that agents and artists in big companies like IMG have 6 month notice periods, so a “consultancy” arrangement may have been put in place to mitigate the fact that Enticott has actually gone and is taking all this major conducting talent and earnings with her. In addition to all the commission payable to IMG for work arranged for Enticott’s artists, IMG will also get whatever comes in over the next 6 months. Perhaps she has worked out some commission split deal with them and as part of that deal she has agreed to remain as a consultant to service out remaining contracts?

    Enticott was appointed Managing Director in 2012 and her tenure there did nothing to reverse the downward spiral of IMG, so perhaps her strengths are in managing artists and not in running a business (two very different things). It’s been an open secret in the music business that Enticott has been wanting to leave for some time. She joins a growing rank of artist managers who have left corporations like IMG to set up on their own so perhaps she too has recognised that the corporate approach is not best suited to classical music. Under Enticott’s rule, the agency still haemorrhaged artists, notably Nicola Benedetti who had been managed by IMG since she won BBC Musician of the Year. She left to be looked after by just an agent and a personal assistant, both professional, caring and well thought of.

    I think many more artists will take this approach in the future. I believe many of the ones whose agents left or were fired recently at IMG still don’t know who will manage them but the only choice is that they are allocated someone. This is not real choice. Chances are that the chemistry between artist and manager just doesn’t work and the relationship won’t be fruitful. Those artists who are in demand have real choice – they will certainly be thinking hard about leaving IMG altogether and joining another company or just another person will manage them better. It is sad for IMG but their overly corporate approach, bad treatment of its staff and artists and the dubious character of it’s owner means that this surely the end for an agency founded by Mark McCormack and once a force to be reckoned with.

    • Classical Music says:

      I respect your comment Mr. Anderson, and feel you have much insight into the music business as well as some insight into the politics of IMG. I too see a need to simplify artist management and avoid the tangled mess of corporate over-control. Like government … too big, too much control in a corporate setting, and you lose the creative independent flexibility to let the artist be everything they are… or can become. This has become blindingly apparent in the diminishing quality of classical music today. True vocal and musical giftings are being sold out for elaborate theatrical multi-media centered showmanship. The artist becomes just a prop in a large ridiculous production. A restricted, controlled and suffocated artist who is packaged in an over saturated roster becomes ‘only an expendable pawn’ in the financial plan of big business. Someone! Save the classical world of music!

  • JohnH says:

    Agencies are ending with quality music making: they are behind the “travelling music director” deals that don’t allow orchestras to develop a real relationship with their music director/principal conductor, behind the “all-included” opera casts (the same agency provides all the artists for a producting, including all the singers and the conductor) that don’t open the doors for new talent, the perpetuation of mediocre soloists that are toured around for intersts other than musical etc.

    The music business would be better with this part of the “business”.

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